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“No Agriculture Without Trees”

Was my favorite saying from Beny, the owner of Mars Farm. Beny had spent his younger years traveling about the world, sometimes by bicycle, to learn about agriculture to own his own farm. Coincidental as I had not really talked much with this guy prior to coming to his farm. One of his most influential experiences during his travels was his visit to the farm of Mansubo Fukuoka in Japan. To this day Beny strives, and struggles sometimes at his own expense, to practice the agricultural methods of Mr. Fukuoka.

Trees are absolutely essential to soil health. All around and throughout his farm Beny has planted trees of various species to absorb excess water, and rebuild soil. Being a former forester he knew a considerable amount about trees, and taught me many surprising things about them. Mr. Fukuoka placed a great emphasis on the necessity of trees in all of his books, and explains how man has created the deserts of the world through deforestation.

For more information on Fukuoka Farming please follow the link and read my post on Natural Farming

Transforming the Land

Overall I was very impressed by the efforts of Beny on his farm. He started with perhaps some of the most abused land in France and is turning it into fertile productive farmland through the use of Natural Farming techniques such as green manuring, cover crops, and no chemical usage of any sort. In short he uses land stewardship practices that are sustainable on the long term.

One major distinction from other farms you can see on Mars Farm immediately is that there is absolutely no bare soil anywhere in sight. Where any activities have taken place that have removed vegetation from the surface, clover seeds are sown to fill in the space. The fact that nature abhors bare soil is an important natural property that is ignored by conventional agriculture to the detriment of the soil. Bare soil is unnatural, highly susceptible to erosion, inhospitable to essential soil micro-organisms, and subsequently dies.

Beny does not use the term ‘weed’, but rather simply refers to them as plants. I would like to note that this is a very, very important philosophical difference in the fundamental view of the natural farmer from the conventional farmer. He also placed great emphasis on the role of so called weeds’ ability to naturally plow the earth, generate soil fertility, and protect your crops against pest infestation and disease outbreak.

Author and long time president of the New York Zoological Society Henry Fairfield Osborn, Jr articulated the dangerous mentality that is the fall of modern agriculture quite well in his book “Our Plundered Planet” when he said, “The miraculous succession of modern inventions has so profoundly affected our thinking as well as our everyday life that it is difficult for us to conceive that the ingenuity of man will not be able to solve the final riddle- that of gaining a subsistence from the earth. The grand and ultimate illusion would be that man could provide a substitute for the elemental workings of nature.”

When Beny first bought his land the soil in his vegetable plots were literally a stagnant marsh in the rainy months. Once dry in the summer months the soil, being completely dead, became as hard as concrete.

A Brief History of the Damage

The poor condition of his land was due to several factors, but perhaps most notably to the American techniques of big chemical farming that France adopted after WW2. The soil was abused over the course of the following decades until in sloped plot it had either been eroded to the hardpan (in some cases even to the bedrock) or in flat plots until it had lost all of it’s fertility.

Once it had become useless for farming it was sold as grazing land. Non-professionals who cared little for the land overgrazed it with their cattle. The cattle blocked the streams dealing the final blow to the already dying soil. Without their proper course the streams dispersed into the plots, flooding them. This in turn halted the bioactivity of nutrient processing thus creating highly acidic conditions. The acids then separate the silt and clay, that are essential for mineral transport within plants, from the humus. The clay and silt formed an impermeable rock hard layer beneath a thin layer of sable raw humus inhospitable to all but rhizomorphic grasses and marsh plants.

Beny has had to employ serious water management techniques he learned through his experience as a forester to return the streams to their ancient routes to drain the land. Everyday he spends a bit of time taking care of the streams unblocking them and helping them carve out their path. He uses the thin layer of topsoil he has to plant trees, daikon radishes, nettles, and other plants with root systems that can penetrate the hard layers of clay, pull minerals back to the top, and create rich healthy soil.

Working for Tomorrow

It took only 40-50 years to completely destroy a once fertile farmland that had been built up and cared-for for thousands of years by countless generations of farmers. Sadly the hard work that Beny is doing largely will not be to his own benefit but to the future generations that will inhabit his land. Similarly the consequences of a lot of the environmental damage our civilization does today will be felt by future generations.

The state of Beny’s land further helped to drive home the reality of the detrimental agricultural practices that are causing soil erosion, threatening biodiversity, destroying communities, and setting the stage for a future famine. These problems are huge and are still spreading faster than the solutions are. I will be writing more on this and other aspects of agriculture in France in a future essay.

In summary my experience at Mars Farm, though not always pleasant and comfortable, was hugely educational and I am very grateful for it. This was my first farm that made a complete break from modern agriculture in almost every sense, and has served as a great source of inspiration for me. I am now thoroughly convinced that these agricultural methods, that some believe are impractical and merely idyllic, are not only pragmatic, but absolutely critical to the long-term survival of human beings.